The Failure of Language to Convey Experience
When mere description is not adequate for conveying the inexpressible to another, the most efficient means of doing so is through metaphor. The most efficient means of using metaphor, in turn, is through the simple comparison of simile. Figurative imagery helps facilitates the difficulty of transforming apprehension into comprehension. Even that mechanism fails the narrative, however. When trying to convey how his experiences in the forbidden zone on the other side of the arroyo have been life-altering, the power of description breaks down completely forces him to turn to metaphor, but all he can do with metaphor is come up with the equally impenetrable metaphor of experience as secret lion roaring the way all big things roar.
The Fall from Paradise
The theme of lost innocence is played out through an allegory of the fall from grace from the Garden of Eden. The golf course represents an Edenic paradise where the boys briefly exist in a state of perfection. From the tall grasses emerge the golfers like serpents and the boys are subsequently banished, having gained knowledge at the expensive of innocent perfection.
Perfection Is an Unnatural State
The narrator bemoans the idea of experience being “Nature’s gang” that consistently keeps teaching them a lesson. Their young lives are a series of events in which perfection is continually corrupted. The idea that perfection is an unnatural state is symbolically situated in the arroyo across the street. That is a location that has been deemed forbidden by the narrator’s mother, but of course they ignore. Over there is found the literally perfectly smooth grinding ball which must be buried and lost forever. Over there is the golf course which is described as heaven. Such perfection cannot cross the road; such perfection cannot be allowed in the real world of the boys.
